WHO WILL SAY a good word for the cliché? Its sins are so numerous. Exhausted tropes, numb descriptors, zombie proverbs, hackneyed sentiments, rhetorical rip-offs, metaphorical flat tires, ideas purged of thought and symbols drained of power – the cliché traffics in them all. A lie can be inventive; an insult can be novel. Even plagiarism implies a kind of larcenous good taste. But a cliché is intellectual disgrace. The word itself seems to shape the mouth into a Gallic sneer. Writers of course have always been extra-spooked by cliché. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” No, I don’t think I shall – because somebody else already did that. And in 2001 Martin Amis officially declared war against cliché with a book entitled, uh, “The War Against Cliché.” “All writing,” he proclaimed, pennants flying, “is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and of the heart.” And indeed Amis in his dazzling career has routed cliché, scattered it, seen it off with a thousand boilingly brilliant and novel images.
more from James Parker at the Boston Globe here.